Chalamet burns up screen in frenetic ping-pong flick

In Josh Safdie's 'Marty Supreme', the young actor gives a career-best performance as an ambitious table tennis player, who is both irresistible and volatile

- Clarisse Loughrey

If Marty Supreme exists to prove that Timothée Chalamet could have easily kicked it with the New Hollywood icons of the Seventies, the Harvey Keitels and the Gena Rowlandses, then point proven. He’s truly one of our greatest talents.

The film’s a fictional portrait of a midcentury table tennis champion - loosely based on Marty Reisman, one of those real New York characters - fuelled by the same powder keg tension its director, Josh Safdie, put into the films he’d previously co-directed with his brother Benny. It spins out like a fairytale penned by someone midway through a stimulant-induced panic attack.

Safdie’s job, in part, is to keep up that pace, even if it’s a touch less relentless and certainly less claustrophobic than before. Chalamet’s Marty Mauser, like Uncut Gems’ Howard Ratner before him, is on the hunt for cash on a tight deadline. Glory lies an international flight away, at the competitions in London and Tokyo, and those cost money he simply doesn’t have.

He’s a true-blue underdog, but not one we’re particularly thrilled to root for. He'll sleep with a girl (Odessa A'zion’s Rachel) and when she turns up pregnant, swear it couldn’t be his because